Tsedal Neeley Quotes

This last benefit—flexibility of scheduling—is particularly invaluable for remote workers who have to negotiate the demands of work and family at the same time and is often touted as one of its more appealing benefits.

In remote work especially, managers don’t always witness the positive contributions that people make. Peers do. Recognitions that capture teammates’ positive contributions create a culture of gratitude and positive reinforcement of the values that members espouse.

Shared goals that make plain and clear the aims that the team is pursuing. Shared understanding about each member’s roles, functions, and constraints. Shared understanding of available resources ranging from budgets to information. Shared norms that map out how teammates will collaborate effectively.

Periodic relaunches are the only structured mechanisms to give teams the ability to quickly pivot in a systematic way.

Effective norms for communication have three primary functions: Outlining interaction and connection plans for all team members regardless of role or location Fostering psychological safety or the group’s level of comfort in expressing individual concerns to one another about tasks and errors Keeping each remote team member connected so that no one feels professionally isolated Plan Your Ongoing Communication

To ensure there is shared agreement on the goals that the team has been mobilized to accomplish, the launch session must be a dialogue. As leaders and team members offer input, ask questions, pose concerns, and respond to others, they begin to understand and buy into the goals from their own perspectives. Leaders can make sure the conversation stays focused on the big picture.

A team launch session is the opportunity to identify clear and specific team goals before taking any other steps forward.

Psychological safety, the condition that allows coworkers to take risks and admit mistakes without fear of reprisal or shame, is key to productive teamwork.

To counter these fears, leaders and their teams must actively foster an atmosphere that makes everyone feel safe speaking up and asking questions. When errors are out in the open, people are able to discuss how to reduce these errors in the future. The result is a team that is constantly learning, engaging, and improving.

In other words, teams can disagree on the how—that is part of the dynamic process of teamwork—but before that process can even begin, teams must build a shared understanding of the goal, or the what.

With what he called the 60–30–10 rule, Hackman concluded that 60 percent of team success depends on prework, or the way in which the team is designed; 30 percent depends on the initial launch; and only 10 percent depends on

A launch that includes a frank discussion of such constraints enables the team to set expectations around how teammates allocate their time to different commitments.

In other words, relaunches are never a one-and-done event. Because work conditions are often dynamic, hitting the reset button once won’t be enough. Periodic relaunches are important in good times but crucial in times of uncertainty

Team launches (and periodic relaunch sessions) drive performance throughout the team’s journey. Relaunches are critical to keep remote teams cohesive, but even more so when teams transition to remote work, and especially by necessity as with COVID-19.

To facilitate the exchange of direct and reflected knowledge among virtual team members, leaders must proactively create a group culture for virtual interactions not explicitly related to work tasks.

Trust is the glue that binds virtual groups and assures work success.

Leaders must recognize the risks associated with digital supervision. Despite what may well be the best of intentions, digital surveillance by definition conveys a lack of trust between employers and employees

When you signal mistrust in employees, you are eradicating the bedrock of effective teamwork.

Hackman established that team performance can be assessed by a specific set of standards. One of his enduring contributions includes three criteria for establishing successful outcomes for teams that are applicable across the board, regardless of industry or context: 1) delivering results, or achieving expected goals; 2) facilitating individual growth, or a sense of personal development and well-being; and 3) building team cohesion, or ensuring that the team is operating as one unit.

we also see how much people value their freedom to choose their remote arrangements. The desire for autonomy at work is a consistent and striking pattern that we see, and one for which remote work is particularly well suited.

McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the global labor workforce will reach 3.5 billion people by 2030. Remote work is increasingly here to stay. The future is in remote work.

As you may have discovered, there is no doubt that remote work has benefits. Commute times disappear. Operational costs get slashed. Bloated travel budgets are no longer imperative. Hiring and retaining employees without asking them to relocate from their home countries or domestic cities becomes conceivable, resolving global travel barriers. Astronomical real estate costs that exist in some locations have the potential to get reduced significantly, a welcome solution in an economic downturn. Societal ills like poverty gaps between rural and metropolitan areas might have the opportunity to close while simultaneously creating an untapped labor pool for companies. Gender gaps may shrink as organizations rethink their remote capacities for maternity leave. Gas emissions can decline, having measurable impact on environmental sustainability.

The more time we spend without regular in-person contact with coworkers, the more persistent and urgent questions about bonding, trusting, and alignment become.

With what he called the 60–30–10 rule, Hackman concluded that 60 percent of team success depends on prework, or the way in which the team is designed; 30 percent depends on the initial launch; and only 10 percent depends on what happens when the actual day-to-day teamwork is under way.

Notice that each of these four domains begins with the same word: shared. That’s because the fundamental goal of a launch session is alignment.

Periodic relaunches are important in good times but crucial in times of uncertainty, as James’s story illustrates. The team might need to switch to a new mediating tool that calls for new norms of communication. The government might introduce new regulations or laws that affect people’s work patterns, as we saw when millions were switched to working from home during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries, markets, or entire industries might make a sudden shift that requires the team to reorient their goals. Periodic relaunches are the only structured mechanisms to give teams the ability to quickly pivot in a systematic way.

The difference between successful and failed team alignment is thus not a matter of whether teammates disagree, but what they disagree about.

teams can disagree on the how—that is part of the dynamic process of teamwork—but before that process can even begin, teams must build a shared understanding of the goal, or the what.

Successful remote teams adhere to the group norms that they establish collectively. Norms are not rules. Rather, norms reflect a set of principles that guide interactions, decision-making, and problem-solving. Generating the norms together is essential; during the launch dialogue, members will learn about the issues that matter to their teammates.

Effective norms for communication have three primary functions: Outlining interaction and connection plans for all team members regardless of role or location Fostering psychological safety or the group’s level of comfort in expressing individual concerns to one another about tasks and errors Keeping each remote team member connected so that no one feels professionally isolated Plan

Recognitions that capture teammates’ positive contributions create a culture of gratitude and positive reinforcement of the values that members espouse.

When a team is in agreement in these four areas—goals, roles, resources, and norms—members become motivated and invested in meeting their team’s goals.

The problem is that once broken, trust is difficult to repair.

swift trust characterizes the high-level of trust that must be “swiftly” established by members in a team formed for a specific project or assignment who expect to be working together for a limited period of time.

Cognitive trust is grounded in the belief that your coworkers are reliable and dependable. Teams motivated by cognitive-based trust use their heads to consider their colleagues’ qualification to do the task at hand; trust is usually formed over time, and confirmed (or disproven) over numerous experiences and interactions.

emotional trust is grounded in coworkers’ care and concern for one another. Relationships built on emotional trust rely on positive feeling and emotional bonds, and they crop up most easily when team members share common values and mind-sets.

Simmel saw that in the modern urban environment, physical proximity inevitably coexists with psychological distance.

crucial to create a period of transition between meetings.

Comparison of Selected Media and Their Capabilities

Mix it up. Tech exhaustion occurs when we let digital tools structure communication activities such as scheduling too many videoconference calls back-to-back, rather than structuring activities around our own needs. Using a mix of available media—synchronous and asynchronous—to match our goals lessens tech exhaustion.

Open, direct, and frequent communication is central to the agile method, enabling individuals to quickly raise issues to the larger team and work with managers to find solutions.

High trust, candid conversation, and accountability are critical for real learning and innovation to happen.

Regardless of the industry, keeping the end customer’s needs at the center of the process at every stage is essential to the agile approach.

professional isolation among remote workers was negatively associated with job performance.

remote work doesn’t significantly hurt job performance in any type of work.

Lean into the inherent flexibility of the remote format. Instead of monitoring team members obsessively, encourage their autonomy. They will gain confidence, agency, and efficiency. The result is a more productive team.

Both intimacy and immediacy are governed by two additional aspects of social presence: efficiency and nonverbal communication.

For remote workers, team cohesion depends on two interrelated factors: the frequency of interactions with other team members, and the quality of relationships that these interactions form.

just because we have videoconferencing available, doesn’t mean we should be on video calls constantly.